The Fifteen Minute Novel is a novel written fifteen minutes at a time with each week day’s section starting with the sentence from the previous day. At least it is attempting to be a novel. For now I am just aiming at one continuous story, worked on for fifteen minutes each day. Started Friday January 1st, 2021 (in case you want to search for the beginning. I can’t wait to see where it ends up. It could be good, or it could be a mess. We’ll have to see. For now, here is today’s fifteen minutes.
Day 83: He took another bite of pizza and chewed thoughtfully as he thought through his explanation.
He took another bite of pizza and chewed thoughtfully as he thought through his explanation. “There are some management issues,” he began after swallowing his bite of pizza. “Things that should have been monitored weren’t. Those are easy to correct. It looks like a section of reports are missing. An entire department’s worth actually. Greg Harrison is the department head and his reports aren’t here. As several other components require the input of his work to function and his timeline effects theirs, that is somewhat of an issue.”
James took a deep breath as Morris nodded. “We can get the files,” Morris said. “It might have been an oversite.”
James nodded. “You might want to ask for a full audit.”
“Something wrong with the budget?”
“Yeah,” James said. He sighed. “I’ve seen it before and it looks as though money has been moved around.” James felt a flash of guilt, after all dealing with Mark and Eric and their doctored expense reports were one thing, this was pointing out embezzling on a larger scale. It did have the look of their work though. He was fairly certain he could even point to the locations it would be best to look. After he caught the doctored expense reports, James went looking through the departmental budgets overseen by the other two. He kept his study quiet so as not to embarrass them if nothing was found. He uncovered a couple of twisty bits of accounting that looked very similar to what was being done here.
Then he untwisted them and said nothing, letting the actions speak for him. Nothing was ever said and under his watchful eye, it never happened again.
‘But I am no longer watching,’ he thought.
“This puts you in a difficult spot,” Morris said.
“It makes me feel a little guilty,” James admitted.
“We don’t have to tell them you suggested the audit,” Morris said.
“I appreciate that,” James replied.
“We’ll just say it is due to other discrepancies and we wanted to make certain everything was in order,” Morris told him. He tilted his head to the side. “Would you be willing to go through those files for us or would that be too much?”
“Well I do know the files,” James said slowly. He turned the thought over in his head. Not bailing the family out was one thing. Actively pointing out their misdeeds to others was something else. “I would prefer not,” he decided.
Morris nodded. “That’s fair. We can claim that we need an independent audit so that there is no hint of a cover up.”
“That would be allowed?” James asked.
“Oh yes, it would be fine. We could claim there was no question of familial loyalty that way. You wouldn’t be compromised and we would have a clean record where no names needed to be changed or blacked out. Besides,” Morris said. “This isn’t really my department. I was only tapped because you were in the program. Getting you to help and then quickly getting you out is in my job description. Extending your time on the project isn’t.”
James nodded. “I can see that.”
Morris took a second slice of Pizza. “I’ll see if I can get the missing reports though. They might have just not been sent along. “It was Greg Harrison?”
“It was,” James confirmed. Morris nodded and took his second slice of pizza out of the conference room leaving James to get back to work. He finished his slice, wiped off his hands and turned back to the files. Given Harrison’s department, James had a feeling the files weren’t left off by accident. He had a bad feeling about them.
Ten til Midnight 